Gold is hated more than ever by both governments and the financial services community. This is because it has now become imperative to keep the illusion of confidence in sovereign debt and paper currencies. To that end, a gentleman by the name of Willem Buiter, Citigroup’s chief economist, shot into the media spotlight by writing a note on the day before Thanksgiving stating his belief that gold is in a six thousand year-old bubble.

Citi’s chief economist penned this “brilliant” commentary in the days just prior to the Swiss referendum on increasing the percentage of gold reserves held by its central bank. In a clear attempt to influence the gold vote, Mr...

What really drives the price of gold? Some say it’s a fear gauge. Others prefer to look at the demand coming from the Indian wedding season. But the silliest of all conclusions to reach is that the dollar price of gold should be determined solely by its value vis-à-vis another fiat currency.

The truth is the primary driver of gold is the “intrinsic value” of the dollar itself, not its value on the Dollar Index (DXY). The “intrinsic value” of the dollar can be determined by the level of real interest rates. Real interest rates are calculated by subtracting the rate of inflation from a country’s “risk free” sovereign yield. Right now the level of real interest rates in the U.S. is a negative 1.55%.

Once upon a time, being middle class draws on the rosy notion of a family with a nice house, who drives a Volvo, goes on beach or skiing vacations once or twice in a year, sends their kids to college, and lives a generally carefree and comfortable life.

Unfortunately, as living costs continue to rise and salaries struggle to catch up, the term “middle class” seems to have taken on a new and greyer meaning in recent years.

In Malaysia, middle class is loosely defined by those who take home a monthly income of RM3,000 and above. Government data from the year 2012 showed that 27.8% of households in the population of 30 million earned between RM3,000 and RM4,999 a month.

I proposed seven drivers of financial implosion in my dissertation. My recent writing has focused on two of them. One is the falling rate of interest on the 10-year government bond. As interest falls, the burden of debt rises. Since the falling rate incentivized more and more people to borrow, the number of indebted people, businesses, corporations, and of course governments is large. When the rate gets to zero, the burden of debt becomes theoretically infinite.

In the US, the downward trend is still in a deceptively mild phase (though there was a vicious spike down on Oct 15 to 1.87%). The rate on the 10-year Treasury is 2.3% today. In Germany, it is down to 0...

On May 19, 2014, the European Central Bank and 20 other European central banks announced the signing of the fourth Central Bank Gold Agreement. This agreement, which applies as of September 27, 2014, will last for five years and the signatories have stated that they currently do not have any plans to sell significant amounts of gold.

Collectively, at the end of 2013, central banks held around 30,500 tonnes of gold, which is approximately one-fifth of all the gold ever mined...

Throughout history, there have been a constant flow of schemes to try to manipulate the gold price and gold itself in terms of paper money. These have come from governments, institutions as well as from individuals. The aim has always been to either establish the value of currencies or enhance that value in terms of gold. The first key to this is to ensure that the gold price is made in the paper currency and not the price of the paper currency in gold.

At school you probably read the book called the Alchemist, where villains tried to invent formulae where they could transform lead to gold. While what they managed to do was a good confidence trick, they could not replicate gold...

– if it were the very movement of the huge volume of gold from west to east, which has been so well documented in recent months, would have been sufficient to drive the price far higher – even taking into account the outflows from the ETFs, which have been way more than countered by the eastwards gold flow.

There are other bigger forces at play here, forces that are also responsible for changing sentiment with regard to gold and thus persuading weak holders to offload their holdings.